Censorship In Lord Of The Flies

Censorship. It’s a word that gives some the sense of protection, however others feel thatsomething important is lost. Truth is, something is lost, truth. Many great works of literaturehave suffered from censorship and others have even been banned. The Lord of the Flies is noexception, a ban slowly creeps up, like a shadow obscuring truth.The Lord of the Flies depicts children (the main ones are: Ralph, Jack, Piggy, and Simon)in a deserted island. It explores the theme of savagery and civilization, however Golding’sdecision to portray children in such a gruesome manner provoked controversy. Parents alsovoiced their concern that the book would send the wrong message to their kids, this eventuallyled to its ban in many school districts. “Viciously, …show more content…
217 The Lord of the Flies), this kind of vivid imagery of savageryis the source of the controversy surrounding the book.Despite all the negativity surrounding this book, it actually holds something very usefulfor anyone who decides to read it. The Lord of the Flies teaches a very important lesson, itexplores the theme of authority, societal collapses, and savagery (Avi. Lord of the Flies:Savagery vs Civilization). The book starts off with the kids having a relatively stable system;each of the kids is assigned a job and the “littlel’uns” gathering fruit. They have a conch thatrepresents order. When the conch shatters things take a turn for the worse. Gradually the kidsbecome savages. The conch shattering symbolizes order breaking, the idea is that without orderhumans will always give in to their primal nature. After the conch shatters it is replaced by thepig’s head idol, this idol symbolizes the dark and primal nature that all humans carry within them(Glass, Chase. Lord of the Flies: Theme Analysis). (This is also why the book is called “TheLord of the Flies”, because it is the name of the demon king, Beelzebub. (Emit, Martin. Meaningof the Title in Lord of the Flies.) It is a reference to the dark nature of the book.) While thistheme truly is dark, it is still a very important thing to understand. The sooner childrenunderstand that the world is not all rainbows and sunshine the better, so this book being bannedfor its dark nature is counterproductive. Educators may believe this theme is “too much” forchildren, but in reality it isn’t.Such an interesting book begs the question, “how did this idea come to be?”. Well,Golding drew heavy inspiration from a Book called The Coral Island (Gangadeen, David. "TheCoral Island…"). Both books feature kids in a deserted island, Golding himself has said that hedrew heavy inspiration from this book. Once the book was published it wasn’t very popular inthe U.S. (Banned Books Awareness,